


The Ballad of Rhaegar and Lyanna: Rock and Roll Me Till I'm Dead

by goldandbeloved



Series: Neon Knights [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV), Mandy (2018)
Genre: 70s, 80s, Carnivals, Drug Use, F/M, Folklore, Heavy Metal, House Stark, House Targaryen, Kissing, Love, Magic, Prophecy, Romance, The Knight of the Laughing Tree, The Night's Watch (ASoIaF), The Prince That Was Promised, everyones old enough, neon knights, stoner metal, stoner rhaegar, teenage stoner lyanna, the dragon has three heads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-11-04
Packaged: 2021-01-22 14:16:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21303455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldandbeloved/pseuds/goldandbeloved
Summary: A Westeros AU where it's always metal, always magic and always trippy.Inspired by Panos Cosmatos' _Mandy_ as well as ASOIAF."When I die, bury me deep, lay two speakers at my feet, put some headphones on my head and rock and roll me when I'm dead." Douglas Roberts/ Panos Cosmatos
Relationships: Elia Martell/Lyanna Stark/Rhaegar Targaryen, Elia Martell/Rhaegar Targaryen, Lyanna Stark/Rhaegar Targaryen
Series: Neon Knights [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1535801
Comments: 5
Kudos: 7





	The Ballad of Rhaegar and Lyanna: Rock and Roll Me Till I'm Dead

The Black Bat demolition derby at the Expo is a swarm of dust and hot oil, something that could only be cured by drinking cold beer, cleansing the dust from a dry throat. The cheering carries past the midway, up to the stand of pine trees high above, close enough to look at the stars.  
He pours blackberry cider( steeped with dried mushrooms and poudre forte) out of the screw top bottle into an orange and yellow paper cup, passes it to the girl sitting on the hood of the Firebird. She stretches, her legs clad in denim and black and gray steel-toed Dayton boots, her black shirt with the violet-tipped airbrushed wolf clinging to her shape, her dark brown hair shaken down around her shoulders, the leather and black feather thong that had held it wrapped around her wrist. She sips, then slicks on a layer of gloss on her lips.

Above them, trees rise higher than a Sept.  
He smiles, suddenly dipping his head, letting his silver-blonde hair fall over his face, shimmer over his black King Crimson tee shirt. He knows he’s handsome, desired, have had girls all over him at the fair, everyone laughing and smiling prettier than all my daughters, enough that he’s stuffed his hair under a snapback with RIDE FREE emblazoned on the front that he brought from the Westerlands guy running the roller coaster. It hasn’t helped him hide any more than he wanted to. He reaches into a black lacquer case, pulls out a perfectly rolled joint in red paper. 

He wants to say something sweet and facile, “I wish this were a rose.” but she’s looking up at the full moon, her cheekbones silvered in the light. He’d rather be scribbling in blue on the paper of the crushed spiral notebooks in the back, stuffed in a leather satchel with a tattered Callahan’s paperback and a crushed copy of _Slan_.  
The radio crackles with static :

_Cold late night so long ago/ When I was not so strong you know…_

She inhales deep, holding the smoke in her chest, exhaling a pale cloud. Rhaegar looks, the silver wings on the hood looking like they’re blooming from her shoulders.

_Mama says she’s worried, growing up in a hurry…_

When he takes it, the filter tastes like Dr. Pepper. She leans over and smiles. 

“It’s Ruby Poison. “ He shakes out hair, smiles. “It grows the best in the Riverlands; they say it’e the ghosts that sing to them-beauty, colours, like the Children of the Forest. It’s got magic. High Heart farms are famous all over.” Instantly he feels foolish, she does have lots of brothers, she plays D&D with them in Winterfell’s basement, reads their subscriptions of Heavy Metal it’s not like this is the first time she has—

“It’s good.” She grins, taking an extra toke, letting it fill her lungs passing it back. “Thanks.” 

He doesn’t need to ask where her brothers are, at the NHI, North Harren Inn. Rhaegar already declined, but he’ll let Eddard be the babysitter for right now, he’s not in the mood to watch Robert and Brandon crushing Lucky can after Lucky can against their heads or drowning Eddard in a pile of strippers to see his long, long-suffering face. He does look funny with tits on his head, as there are many Polaroids to prove, but there’s something missing and Rhaegar wants to be here.  
_The moon doesn’t want us to be anywhere but here tonight. _  
She smells like heavy green smoke, clean sweat, spruce and hint of sweet musk.

_The wind of time is blowing through me  
And it’s all moving relative to me. _

“Nice here. Quiet. I don’t mind hanging out. Too many people acting like dicks on the Midway.” 

(He’d heard something about a fight earlier in the week, a kid getting knocked into the dirt by the Tilt-A-Whirl, skinny guy from the Neck, someone shoving him, tossing his fried pickles into the dirt. Stupid. Rhaegar’s just as glad a couple louts got dealt with, wouldn’t have minded dropping a bottle of SoCo off somewhere to see that it fell into the right hands. He’s had other things on his mind, places to be. If he wasn’t there to fight them, at least someone-

She tilts her head, taking the joint back. He notices the scrapes on her knuckles, the bandage on her shoulder. On the stereo, the tape clicks.

“I learned to read auras once in King’s Landing.”

Rhaegar feels like he ought to tell a story.

(He’d worked for the psychic for an afternoon, playing for a crystal healing class and meditation. On the way out they’d been utterly gracious, but he heard two students saying they hoped the regular guitarist would be back next week. The psychic given him a few silver stags and a persimmon and mint smoothie, sat him in front of a white cardboard backdrop, said his aura was just what she thought and made a few suggestions to help him find his next gig. Later he and Barristan watched the sun set from the pier and swallowed the dregs of cheap beer he’d purchased before making their way back to the Red Keep where the stones glowed garnet, calcite, citrine like the setting sun as they parted . It was a good day and Elia smiled when he tried to read her aura. Later while she slept, he’d run fingers over his silver strings trying to see the notes as droplets of flame.)

She looks him right in the eyes. “Hmm.What colour’s mine?”  
Rhaegar laughs. “Give me a minute.”

(The psychic had given him a polished stone; stormy, then when turned with bright flashes of gold. Violet. Blue. Rhaegar remembered turning it over late that night watching frozen lightning ripple across a miniature sky.)

They lie there looking at the stars, the pines at scratching the sky like cold claws.

She sits up, passes Rhaegar the joint. It’s like a spark leaps across their fingers. She leans into it, putting one fingertip to his. There is something beautiful about how it’s slightly dirty with oil, like she’s a pearl set in dragon glass. Rhaegar wants to shiver, but instead she does, lovely as a trembling tree.

_I’m charged with cosmic energy  
Has the world gone mad or is it me?_

Rhaegar notices the tiny speck of blood on the leg of her jeans, remembered the winning driver had scraped his knee opening the door before he vanished into the crowd, invisible, his demolition derby purse unclaimed, TEACH THEM MANNERS blinking on the JumboTron over the empty winner’s circle.

“When the time comes.’ they had asked him in the trailer out by the cattle judging pens, “Will you do what must be done?”

Her eyes are smoky grey and dragon glass in the half light, ones that glitter like a champion’s. Rhaegar swears he can see time refracted in them back and forth, back and forth.  
A star streaks across the horizon and Rhaegar swears the edges flicker garnet as it falls.  
A vision, written across the Harrenhal sky. He sees three stars closer, flaring in the darkness. Three heads.  
She looks at him.  
She sees.  
“Do you ever feel-like you’re part of something bigger?”  
He looks at her, head spinning. 

is this what looking into a glass candle feels like? Does a master’s stomach lurch and spin at the revelation, if It flared to life would the newborn gray rat shatter it to silence, or would they let their mind expand to meet it? 

Lights flicker around the edges of Rhaegar’s mind. Ah.

Like it has been ordained Rhaegar watches himself slide off his black biker jacket, tucks it around her shoulders. The tinny music lurches and spins as she leans towards him, him towards her.

“Look at that light .” She sighs. “The stars are closer here.”

The air seems to catch fire around her, incandescent.  
"Are there lights in Oldtown now?" he thinks.  
Rhaegar thinks backward, wondering if this was how Visenya and Rhaenys glowed, how the sun lit them on the morning of the conquest. Forward and there is only them, the wind of the future at their backs, nudging them forward into fall or flight.

Lyanna fixes her eyes on him. They’re not just stormy, they have flashes of gold and green, like a vivid, secret legend only she knows, one that they both somehow understand.

_I loved a maid as fair as winter, as pale as the moon._

His head is swimming. “Beautiful. Beautiful.”  
“So are you.” she whispers, her eyes huge and dark like a court lady’s, wide like she’s been at the belladonna.  
From the stereo, the music soars.

_Oh let the sun beat down upon my face Stars to fill my dream  
I’m a traveller of both time and space _

“Tell me.” She sighs, the wind shaking the tops of the trees, scent of rain and forest. Her hand is suddenly intertwined with his, like it always has been, commenced before birth, to bring them here. He can see it all around her, a crown like winter lit ablaze, Northern light.  
He’d fall to his knees if he could, but the Maiden-Mother-Wolf-Queen extends her hand.

"Blue." He whispers as if in prayer." Your aura ." he says, "It's blue."

Azure fire flickers around her fingers, like burning bones and claws. Strange.

Rhaegar thinks of strange sacrifices, gifts. Offerings laid on ice with torches blazing in the distance, a luminous cool maid walking on a wall of ice. Strange things burn blue and in her footsteps he sees rose-vines.

“Get ready! There’s no turning back now.” The bar on the roller coaster snaps down, the cars spin through the haunted house, the accelerator whines at the derby, red flakes falling from the quickly painted leaves on the victor’s car.

(When Aegon kissed Rhaenys, did Visenya feel it in her bones, in the hidden places where they were all knit together? Did they know?)

Her lips taste like prophecy, sweet, vivid and strange. Her lust is brighter than any flame. He tries to catch her shirt as she tosses it into the woods, he sees the edges of the wolf in the moonlight, fading and falling.

“It’s okay. I don’t need it anymore.”

After that, there is only fire under the trees and starry sky.

The tape hisses, skips ahead, but they don’t notice.

_All will be revealed._  
All will be revealed.  
All will be revealed. 


End file.
